


a great peace

by bastaerd



Series: role reversal au [1]
Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Episode Related, Gen, Role Reversal, episode 1- go for broke, pre-collins/goodsir
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-03
Updated: 2021-02-03
Packaged: 2021-03-14 08:47:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,464
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29168307
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bastaerd/pseuds/bastaerd
Summary: Billy’s eyes, clouded with illness and with a sickly shine to them, searched him out and did not quite find him before he spoke again.“I think I’m afraid of it,” he said.Collins nodded. “Most everyone is.”A breath rattled out of Billy’s chest, then. His eyes shut, then opened again with a visible effort.“Not in that way."
Relationships: Henry Foster Collins & Harry D. S. Goodsir, Henry Foster Collins & William Orren
Series: role reversal au [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2141250
Comments: 9
Kudos: 15
Collections: The Terror Bingo





	a great peace

**Author's Note:**

> for the [terrorbingo](http://theterrorbingo.tumblr.com) prompt _**role reversal.**_

“Am I going to die?”

Billy Orren’s voice shook in the chill of the sick bay. His throat sounded clogged with blood, though he had stopped vomiting it up, which McDonald counted as a mercy and Collins was careful not to count as anything. He was grateful that that part of the discomfort had abated, for whatever it might have been worth, and knew that the worth was very little.

This one was a question he did not know how to answer. Rather, he did, and the answer was “Yes.”

He pursed his lips in reply instead, pulling his mouth into a practiced, reassuring look and hoping it did its job. With a flannel rag, he mopped the sweat at Billy’s temples, the clamminess of his skin bleeding through it, or perhaps that was the damp cloth itself. There was not much left to do but this: sitting by his side, dabbing at his brow, and waiting for him to pass. Billy’s eyes, clouded with illness and with a sickly shine to them, searched him out and did not quite find him before he spoke again.

“I think I’m afraid of it,” he said.

Collins nodded. “Most everyone is.”

A breath rattled out of Billy’s chest, then. His eyes shut, then opened again with a visible effort.

“Not in that way,” he told Collins, his gaze going distant.

After that, the room fell into an uneasy quiet, the kind full of anticipation. The kind which occupies an empty house before guests arrive, Collins thought to himself, though Billy had preferred privacy over having a doctor standing nearby, ready for the moment he finally died. An acquaintance of his, the Second Master, a man called Goodsir whom Collins recognized by the silhouette of his curls alone, had expressed his worry for him, and had visited him in sick bay not long after the two surgeons had made up a cot for him of the examination table. Goodsir had pressed Billy’s hands and told him they would be glad to see him above deck again when he was better again, but the look on his face betrayed his doubt, and all could see it. Collins had been grateful for the other man’s presence. Easier not to be the one to stick one’s toe in the door, when it came to death.

For a long while, an hour at least, it seemed as though Billy might slip away in the cradle of sleep, might not so much die as fail to awaken, and that would be that. But Collins, a book in his lap where he had been reading before dozing off, found himself brought to consciousness by the sound of fast, wheezing breaths; Billy’s eyes were wide open and free of the clouds that had befallen them, mouth gaping and terrified, chest heaving as he tried to drag in air, as if he could not at all. Leaping to his feet and knocking his book to the floor, Collins stood over him, holding first his shoulders and then his forearms when that could not provide enough leverage. Still, Billy thrashed against him. His mouth opened wide, fish-like, lips moving but no sound coming out.

“Breathe, Billy,” Collins told him. “Listen to me, Billy,  _ breathe-” _

A gagging sound cut him off. All at once, his eyes went dull like marbles, and he stopped fighting Collins’ grip, going boneless against the pillow. It took a long time for it to be over so quickly, Collins thought to himself. The named-- Billy Orren-- should not die without ceremony; it was unnatural. He should not have died like a stranger, should not have looked so much like a cadaver.

For some time, he stood there beside Billy. He released his hold of his wrists, arranging them first folded over his stomach, and then at his sides, and straightened the pillow that had been knocked askew during Billy’s fit. The blanket, too, he pulled up to Billy’s chest and smoothed. Only then did he realize that Billy had died with his eyes open. They stared sightlessly into the corner of the sick bay, and Collins looked over his shoulder at the place, finding nothing but his own unease before closing Billy’s eyelids for him. Dr. McDonald would have to be told.

The doctor had retired to his cabin after it became clear that they had exhausted all curative measures and were then left with the palliative, but he answered the door alert and still dressed when Collins knocked. There was a sadness to his eyes, and when Collins told him what had happened, he only nodded and said, “I supposed as much.” Then, he sighed, running a hand down over his face in much the same motion as Collins had when closing Billy’s eyes.

“Sir John will want an autopsy done, I suspect,” he mused aloud with a resigned lift of his brows.

Collins cleared his throat. “Is it necessary?” he asked. Surely they had enough information as it was; Billy’s ailment was easily recognizable as consumption, and they had sent three men back to England for the same illness the prior year. McDonald seemed to have the same thought as he, but shook his head.

“I would rather not cut into the lad,” he said, “but he may be an indicator of things to come. Now that we’re so far apart from any help but our own, no caution is superfluous.”

“Must we?” Collins asked. He was no squeamish man, nor was he a stranger to dissection, but none of those cadavers had been people he had known, men with whom he had worked. For his purposes, they had always been dead. Billy had been alive.

McDonald offered a bitter purse of his lips. “If the captain orders it done,” he replied. “I’ll be hoping that he doesn’t. Get some sleep, Mr. Collins, if you can.”

Collins returned to sick bay as if to do something about the body there, but short of sewing it into a hammock or conducting an autopsy then and there without McDonald’s supervision, there was not much he could think to do. The book he had knocked from his lap was still on the floor, its pages bent where it had landed open and lying flat. He picked that up, looking around for an unoccupied surface-- the table, as it was, was currently in use-- and finding a place for it on a shelf beside two specimen jars. The thought occurred to him that he might have read to Billy, even though he likely would not have registered the words, drifting in and out of lucidity as he had been. Perhaps a human voice would have eased his way. After all, the fear of dying often came second only to the fear of dying alone. He retired to his quarters, sending one last look to the body before extinguishing the last candle lighting the room.

The next morning, there came a knocking at the door to sick bay, and Collins answered it to find Goodsir standing there in the passageway, his brow furrowed as it frequently was.

“I’ve come to see about Mr. Orren,” he said. “I- How is-?”

He could not seem to work out which question to ask. Collins took pity on him, but at the same time, Goodsir found the answer somewhere in his face, and his own expression crumpled.

“Oh, no,” he said.

“He passed during the night,” Collins explained to him quietly. In the back of his mind echoed the sounds of it, the horrible gasping and sucking of air, the gurgling of Billy’s lungs, wetter than a death rattle. He wished he could tell Goodsir that Billy had died in his sleep, gone off peacefully.

“I-I’m very sorry to hear that,” Goodsir said, casting his eyes downwards and worrying at the wig in his hands. “You were with him, then, I suppose? As he passed?”

Collins nodded. “Yes,” he replied, “I was.”

“Thank you,” Goodsir told him. A hint of a smile came to him, though it was a sad one, dampened by the news of this loss. “I just heard word that one of Terror’s boys died yesterday, as well.” He sighed, then, as if this, too, was his to shoulder.

“Did you know him, sir?” asked Collins, but he shook his head.

“No, no,” he said. “Young.”

Collins winced. “A shame,” he said, “for a boy to go so soon.”

There was a beat, wherein Goodsir blinked, before he spoke again. “Oh, no,” he hurried to correct himself. “Young was the boy’s name, I believe. He fell over the gunwale. Drowned, before anyone could reach him.”

Died alone, Collins’ mind supplied for him; he suppressed a shudder at the thought. “A terrible way to go,” he said in sympathy. He wondered, but did not ask, if Goodsir had been above deck at the time and had seen it happen, albeit from afar, or if he had heard of the incident after the fact.

“Something peculiar happened before he fell,” Goodsir added. “He- the mate heard him say something about running. ‘He wants us to run,’ or something along those lines.”

Collins was reminded of the way Billy’s eyes had fixed at a point over his shoulder. “To run, sir?” he asked. “Did you interpret any meaning from it?”

Goodsir appeared conflicted, and then shook his head, his focus going back to his fingers and the heavy knit of his wig. “I heard it by hearsay,” he replied. “To tell you the truth, I wouldn’t know what to make of it, even if I had heard it firsthand.”

* * *

One September day in 1846, Collins and Goodsir came simultaneously to two opposite conclusions. Beneath the ice, cradled by the sea in the weight of his diving suit, Mr. Goodsir watched the corpse of David Young bob in the water and could not help but ponder on the pervasiveness of life, even here, where he himself could not breathe unassisted, where the cold shut men’s bodies down like the flame of a candle.

Above the surface, in the comparative warmth of Erebus’ sickbay, the Dr. McDonald observed Mr. Collins as he cut a Y-shaped incision in Billy Orren’s torso and peel open the skin to reveal a nest of guts, sitting there still like a tableau of wax fruit. As he cracked open his sternum and catalogued his organs, felt the mass of his liver all brown and slick with viscera, Mr. Collins could not help but ponder on the pervasiveness of death, even hidden in all this life.

* * *

They had occasion to speak shortly thereafter. Billy’s body still lay on the doctors’ table for most of the evening, and it was less for cleanliness’ sake and more for privacy’s that Goodsir’s physical was delayed until the following day. Morfin and Weekes carried out the hammock-wrapped corpse in the same breath as Goodsir arrived, sidestepping them as they shouldered out the door.

“Mr. Goodsir,” McDonald greeted him, grabbing his stethoscope and slinging it around his neck. Collins greeted him in kind-- “Mr. Goodsir.”-- and Goodsir, looking rather harried by all that had gone on in such a short period of time, took a moment before replying.

“Ah,” he said, blinking. “Doctors- Dr. McDonald, Dr. Collins.”

“Just Collins will do,” Collins told him gently, bringing up a chair for him and placing it beside the table. Ever since the previous day, his hands had retained a waxy chill he could not seem to mitigate, and he rubbed his palms against the wool of his trousers in an attempt to dispel it. Goodsir was pink about the nose and cheeks and similarly cold from the frigid Arctic air, and gave a shuddering shiver as he sat and set to work shedding his heavy coat. As McDonald stepped in to conduct the examination, Collins took Goodsir’s coat, folding it so that it would not develop a crease; he was about to set it on the table when he remembered who-- or was it a what, now?-- had been on it prior, and found a different place for it.

“All this to-do about the dive,” McDonald was saying as he pressed his stethoscope to Goodsir’s chest and listened to his lungs, “and I’ve not asked you what you thought of it. How was it, Goodsir, being under the water such as you were?”

Goodsir gave a deep sigh. Already his skin had regained its color, not so blanched from the cold anymore. “It was like a dream, sir,” he answered. The sea seemed to crest behind his eyes as he said so, still caught in the wonder of it, even a day out from the dive. Collins almost envied him for that wonder. There was a lot he would give, he thought, to look out at the water and not think of what he knew and did not know, and not let it terrify him. So much uncertainty lay out there. It even encroached upon the ships. The sailors tracked it in with them like the frost that clung to their clothing.

“Well, there you have it, Goodsir,” he heard McDonald pronounce, after the examination was concluded, “a clean bill of health for you.”

“That doesn’t surprise me,” said Goodsir in that sincere way of his. “I found the dive most invigorating.”

He set his clothing to rights, and Collins retrieved his coat. At first, Goodsir thanked him and made to accept it from his hands, but Collins replied, “Allow me, Goodsir,” and held it open for him so that he could slip his arms into the sleeves. Goodsir blinked and pinkened, but nodded his thanks again, and accepted his help. It was perhaps too gentlemanly a gesture for such close quarters, but if either he or McDonald thought anything of it, neither made an indication.

“Thank you,” Goodsir said, once he had gotten the coat settled properly on his shoulders, and buttoned it up to his neck. If one excused the brass buttons, he looked rather like a priest like that, with the thin sliver of his ivory jumper exposed above the stiff collar. He would be very easy to confess to, Collins thought, as he always had a listening ear and kind words-- though his kindness ran only as far as was truthful-- for those who needed one or the other. His cap, though, dispelled the illusion, tenuous as it was.

“I must get back to the men,” Goodsir said. He seemed not to know how to conclude the visit, but exchanged clumsy goodbyes and left. The smell of saltwater lingered at the spot where he had stood, or perhaps that was the vinegar McDonald had used to treat one of the other sailors’ headaches earlier that morning, or Collins’ own imagination.

**Author's Note:**

> find me on [tumblr](http://edward-little.tumblr.com).


End file.
